An interesting breeding possibility

[Nan_PA_6b]

Any updates on this project?

Also, one anecdote: when I knew nothing about tomatoes, I grew a six pack of Romas from K-Mart. At the end of the season, a frost killed the plants, but the fruits remained on the vine & ripened for another two weeks. Anyone else have this happen with Romas?

Nan

[goodwin]

Yes, I'm using the LA1777 cross as a rootstock. And I now have a strain with edible fruit - actually pretty good-tasting fruit. I'm not sure it is entirely stable, though.
Use of the litchi tomato as a rootstock was also successful. Those grafted plants made it through a light frost. I read later that it was being used as a rootstock in East Asia for other reasons.
Hopefully, I'l get around to posting some photographs one of these days.
You are right. A freeze that kills the leaves appears to shock the plant into ripening the fruit. Peppers are the same way. You can do the same thing by pulling the plant upward until the root mass breaks a little. The remaining tomatoes will ripen quickly.

Lee

[bower]

I would love to hear if FusionPower did proceed with his original idea for the multi parent cross combining record cold tolerance, earliness, and cold setting?

I ended up crossing my F1 of Eva Purple Ball X PI 120256 to a pink mini-beef F2 of Stupice X Black Cherry in 2015, shooting to combine Stupice's earliness and cool weather set, with the cold tolerance of PI 120256 and taste genetics of the others. I grew out my six seeds of this F1 this season, and it was one of the highlights for sure... Really vigorous plants that set well in all our conditions hot or cold and had a fine yield of sweet and tasty fruit. I saved seed from the pink and red F1s that had the best set as well as best tasting of all. The one plant I put outdoors also ripened nearly all fruit by September, and quite a bit more than any other outdoor contenders.

Nothing close to the capabilities/traits described in the OP, however!. I have another line which is outstanding for foliage health and cold tolerance, keeping on through some light frost nights, but they too were sincerely toast the night we dropped to 27F.

[Keen101]

I was able to get a few fruits late in the season from Joseph's Fern x S. habrochaites (LA1777). It seemed very self-incompatible. Surprised i got seed at all. Got many fruits on the S. peruvianum. Many fruits on the F1 [S. pennellii x domestic]. I am growing an F2 of it this winter. It has huge Potato Leaves!! Got a few fruits of S. habrochaites, also seemed highly self-incompatible. Fern x LA1777 showed lots of purple foliage when it got cold. Think it was one of the last to survive but alas when it got really cold all the tomatoes died.

[goodwin]

I also was able to get one cross to LA1777 which I'll plant out again this season. It has segregated 'wildly' the past two years, but some strains still have that odd scent to the foliage and the cold-hardiness.
Your PL plant is a interesting development. What is the fruit like?
Lee

[Keen101]

Originally Posted by goodwin

Your PL plant is a interesting development. What is the fruit like?

Yeah, i don't know yet. Trying to grow it indoors is probably not ideal. It has started to develop a few fruits they fell off later. I'm trying to keep it watered with some extra flower and fruit hydroponic nutrient fertilizer. It has formed some new flowers and one has formed a small developing fruit from hand pollination. The appearance now resembles the slow formation of the last F1 generation and slow growing fruit, but who knows what it will be like fully developed.

Here is a photo of the F1 parent fruit without the potato leaf trait. [S pennellii hybrid]


here is an old photo of this new potato leaf plant without fruit. [S pennellii hybrid]


p.s. I will add that the pennellii strains do not have the characteristic "tomato smell", but nor do they really have a bad "wild tomato" smell either. Hardly any smell at all, if any smell it is a very light almost lemony smell kinda like lemon basil. Not terrible at all. So i'm really liking that. Some of the other wild tomatoes smell funky. But i kinda think normal tomatoes don't always smell the best either in large numbers. I don't know. Will be interesting to see how smells develop in future generations and how those smells affect flavor.

[Harry Cabluck]

This discussion has been mentally stimulating. Thanks to all involved.

[goodwin]

I'm continuing with this project, now working toward tomatoes grown in unheated hoophouses for the early market. At this point I have several S. habrochaites crosses with good cold-tolerance (down to 25-28 F several nights in a row). Two also have excellent fruit set and flavor. They are both large cherries, shown below. I plan to slowly increase the size by crossing back to Sasha's Altai or others like LA3969, 0-33, and I-3.
I also requested some seedstock from GRIN which should arrive shortly. It includes high brix lines, two more accessions with the (sucr) trait, and a few ultra-early strains like Beaverlodge 6714.
A discussion of germplasm available from GRIN probably deserves its own thread. I know several of us have taken advantage of that resource and could share information.\

[eyolf]

Bumping this old thread, as I ran across an even older thread searching for something else, with posts by @fusionpower, Carolyn, and myself:

https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink/top...ink_source=app

Then I recalled that we had a late frost here on May 26 last year, it affected about 3/4 of my garden, including Tomatoes and peppers. I lost a few, but was able to save some by "washing the frost off" with a sprinkler can. Some plants looked very sad for several days, some bit the dust, but three Heshpoles survived without damage.

This wasn't "lower 20's freeze", merely frost on leaf surfaces more than an inch or two above the warm soil. Part of the garden is in the lee shadow of a building and was exempt.

But the cross that Darryl observed in 2007 or so seems to exhibit some degree of frost tolerance and seems to have passed into what he shared with me.

Thank you, Darryl.



Each plant produces about 10 like this, 2 or 3 larger, and like most, delivers a few smaller fruits late in the season. These need a few more days.

Sent from my moto x4 using Tapatalk

[bower]

Those look lovely. Goodwin's look great as well. That's a very heavy cropper!

We had a lot of very cold summers since this thread was started, so it's inevitable to select what can be productive and delicious in spite of the really bitter weather. I have finally a couple of sibling lines at F7 which seemed stable last year and I hope this season will confirm it. They are my personal favorites of all my meandering crossings, which somehow managed to embody all the traits I was looking for - except they are small fruit, 2-3 locules, large for cherries.
Size is not that important cw other traits, but I do have a couple of sibling/cousin lines that are mini beefs - 5-6 locules, determinate, early, rugged etc. which I'm crossing with larger fruit again and selecting back to the determinate and other traits. Two F1s with the minibeef to grow out this year, one is the PI120256 cross, a ruffled red with about 6 oz fruit, and another favorite OP Oaxaca Jewel PL. One ends, another begins...